Recently I've been researching Southern food in the 1800s for a dinner that I'm cooking for. Weirdly, this style of cooking is somewhat in revival in Chicago with restaurants like Big Jones and Carriage House serving fairly authentic period foods. I was at Big Jones recently and all their biscuits are made with pastured lard. That's pretty hard to find in the South these days.

I've written before about the animal rights-locavore cold war. In some people's eyes, they are two types of liberal food movements, but the truth is that the locavore movement has its true roots in conservatism, as exemplified by the agrarian pillars of the movement such as Wendell Berry and Joel Salatin. Animal rights is just plain radical modernism, a pathology of alienation from nature.

I find it quite amusing when people accuse me of having one hunter-gatherer stereotype when it's also clear they hold one themselves. The most popular thing to accuse people of is that they hold the "man the hunter" hypothesis that people ate mostly meat and men provided most of the food. The challenging hypothesis is that humans mostly ate plants and women provided most of the food.

Recommended Books

Though much maligned in the paleo diet community, this is a book you should give a chance. A great primer on evolutionary biology and a caution against making too much of paleolithic "just so" stories.